Statistics drive home the point:
-- More than 38,000 Americans, including roughly 600 Kentuckians, take their lives each year, and those numbers are growing. From 1999 to 2010, suicide rates in Kentucky rose 22 percent to 14.2 deaths per 100,000 residents. Indiana's rate rose 26 percent, to 13.1 per 100,000; the U.S. rate rose 15 percent, to 12.1 per 100,000.
-- Guns are used in about half of U.S. suicides, compared with 64 percent in Kentucky. And suicides involving firearms are fatal 85 percent of the time, compared with less than 3 percent for pills, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
-- Nine in 10 suicides are associated with mental illness, according to studies examining "psychiatric autopsies" of mental health history after death. But gun laws in Kentucky and Indiana allow all but a small fraction of the mentally ill to buy firearms from licensed dealers, or obtain them without restraints from family members, friends, gun shows or online.
-- For those who do survive a suicide attempt, studies show that 90 percent don't go on to die by their own hands later.
Choice is intolerable to some people, unless it's approved choice. Of course, as the article notes, half of all suicides are done with some method other than a gun. Hanging, for example, doesn't leave a person a lot of chances to back out. And since there's no correlation between gun laws and suicide rates, I don't see the point here.
ReplyDeleteActually, Greggy, the correlation between gun laws and suicides is remarkably strong.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's not a matter of choice. Gunloons would have you believe that all suicides involve a careful, well-reasoned, informed choice to end one's life. The reality is very different. Most suicides are spur-of-the-moment, irrational impulses. Quite often by teens or young adults whose level of maturity is not yet fully developed.
Yes, there are those who make rational, informed decisions. Usually, these are folks with progressive and terminal illnesses that result in an ever-diminishing quality of life. But they also have the gift of time and reflection to decide their fate.
But most suicides aren't these cases. Instead, they're folks who suffer momentary and *temporary* bouts of depression or despondency. I'll give a personal anecdote: friend of mine had a 16 yo nephew. Said nephew had a girlfriend (his first) whose parents were about to move away across the country. Despondent, kid went out in the woods and shot himself with his parent's handgun. Tell us, Greggy, was this an informed choice?
Also not mentioned by Greggy, is the murder-suicide. That's when one person decides another's time is up (murder), then decides prison for life isn't such a hot option and kills himself. Greggy?
Jade is correct that there is a correlation between gun laws and suicide (so long as we're talking national and not global). But does Jade care to explain why the correlation between gun laws and murder is remarkably ZERO?
DeleteHe won't do that. Another one and done comment, I'm sure.
You know what, you lying sack of shit, we've been through all of this before. I tell you what, let's start with the first false claim. Let's look at countries with higher rates of suicide than ours or look at countries with rates similar to ours. Then we'll proceed to look at states in this country.
DeleteAs I said, we've done all this before. You're too fucking lazy to stick around for an actual argument--you know, that thing where you have to provide verifiable facts connected together with logic. It's so much easier to talk baby talk and refuse to do any actual work.
But surprise me. Then we can discuss what rights individuals have. Of course, your side is great for talking rights--until such time as people make choices that you don't like. Then you yammer on about how the government needs to step in and stop those decisions. Since unfortunately, your mothers didn't make or didn't have the right choice available to them, we have to listen to your claims about how wonderful the rights are that your side will allow us to have.
I'm waiting. Will we have a rational discussion of the facts? Are you even capable of such?
The murder connection is only zero to you, TS. Well, I suppose Greg and the others are with you, but that's about it. In order to follow your calculations one has to be a biased close-minded gun rights fanatic.
DeleteNo, one just needs to understand math. You have never come back with anything to dispute the calculations. You can argue about why the numbers are what they are, but you can't argue with the numbers themselves.
DeleteMikeb, you've been shown the homicide rates of the different states and the attempt at correlating those with the gun laws that each state has. The result was nothing. Now unless you're claiming that many more murders happen in states with good gun laws or that states with bad gun laws inflate their numbers, you're stuck with a fact that goes against your whole narrative.
Delete"Jan Ulrich, Kentucky's top suicide prevention coordinator, said it's not that guns cause suicides, but they are so lethal that there almost never is "a second chance."
ReplyDeleteSo then the question is what can be done to prevent suicide and not interfere with a person's rights? Heading down the road of making it easier to prohibit possession due to mental illness is a dangerous road to travel. Requiring providers to report such things is requiring breaking confidentiality between the provider and the client, which will result in clients either lying to the provider, or not seeking help at all.
MikeB considers those caught in this web, "the cost of doing business". One thought I have in this regard is that once you open the door to forcing a health care provider to violate the confidentiality with their patient, you also open the potential for loss of all privacy. If you now say its ok when mental illness is involved, what comes next? You also recreate the stigma that used to surround people with mental health issues and prevented many from seeking help.
Nobody likes secrecy, I mean privacy, like you gun owners.
DeleteMike, the privacy I'm talking about here has nothing to do with gun ownership. This is all medical confidentiality. Sort of like what women are rightfully demanding when making reproductive health choices. We have seen many examples lately of attempts to pass laws restricting this privacy. As I said in my earlier post, once you put in execptions to this privacy, eventually someone else will think its ok for whatever their favorite cause is.
DeleteThe ACLU "likes" privacy, and they're not noted for supporting gun rights.
DeleteMy heart goes out to the people that arrive at a point in their lives where they decide to attempt suicide. Every attempt, whether "successful" or not, is a tragedy. And I applaud the heroic efforts to provide counseling and care for people contemplating suicide.
ReplyDeleteI do not support efforts to make the world suicide proof. Such an objective is utterly and totally impossible. Furthermore, such an effort infringes the rights of other citizens who have no interest in suicide. "Solutions" that sacrifice other citizens' rights to save a troubled person's life are not solutions at all.
- TruthBeTold
TS: Not "ZERO" as you claim. Weak gun laws lead to more murders; the correlation is very strong. Even Gary Kleck, no fan of any gun laws, believes stronger background checks lead to reduced homicide rates.
ReplyDeleteHere's a study from 2004 (it's been replicated several times):
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
It shows a gun in the household correlates to nearly a 5X greater risk of suicide and a 3X greater risk of homicide. That's not a "ZERO" correlation.
Greggy: You cannot help but lie. I guess since your "manhood" is so thoroughly invested in your guns, it's to be expected that truth becomes a victim.
It is zero, Jade. I've proved it here multiple time: state murder rates vs. state gun laws equals zero correlation. The study you cited it junk science. If it were true, those states with weaker gun laws would have higher murder rates- but they don't.
DeleteJadegold, prove that I have lied, or shut the fuck up.
Delete